Awesome! Let’s play

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Yipee! My newest toy arrived this morning, a day earlier than expected, which was nice. It’s an Eachine EG16 ‘Wing God’ drone and I can’t wait to start playing with it. And with a name like that I’m expecting it to be something a little bit special!

And it is – as far as it goes. Although it has some amazing features, it’s by no means a ‘professional’ type drone even though it has a high quality 4K remotely controllable video camera on board. While I’ve been waiting for it to arrive, I’ve been watching a few reviewer videos about it on Youtube and although it comes highly recommended, it’s really only at the top of the ‘toy’ end of the drone range, which is much more extensive than I originally thought.

Here’s a shot of what came in the box. There were some other bits and pieces too, like a USB charging cable, a set of spare props, a set of prop guards (which I’ll try to avoid using as apparently, according to the ‘experts’, they slow the drone down and also needlessly waste energy) and a lttle screw driver.

The basic drone only comes with a single battery which is claimed to give a flying time of 15 minutes. However, all of the Youtube reviewers say that it’s more like 10 minutes, so I ordered two extras giving me a total flying time of 30 minutes. Here’s a shot of the drone with its arms unfolded in ready-to-fly mode.

Although it’s possible to use the controller to take off and fly the drone ‘blind’, this is not how it’s done and it wouldn’t open the door to all of the delights that the little Wing God has to offer. Much like my new GoPro, there’s an app that it connects to via your smartphone which is mounted on the controller and shows you exactly what the video camera is seeing allowing you to start and stop recording exactly when you want to.

It also lets you control all of the other drone facilities that I’ll go into in detail in my next post when I get the chance to start flying it after I’ve charged all the batteries up – 8 x AA so I have two sets of controller batteries and 3 x drone batteries that each take just over 2 hours to charge from standard USB ports. I’m also using my fast phone charger that will get one up and running a bit quicker enabling me to get my hands on the drone controls sooner than would otherwise be possible.

I’ve been thinking about getting a drone for a while and now’s a good time as I can’t fly ‘properly’ in my aircraft and flying the drone is the next best thing. It can also be flown from my garden at this time of self-isolation. I’ve been admiring drone videos on Youtube for some time, especially those taken by other aircraft pilots before they take off and after they’ve landed at their destinations, so hopefully with time and practise I’ll be able to do the same. I’ll have to wait and see… but now it’s time to go off, read the fairly extensive manual that came with it and get going!